Knoxville to San Antonio

As soon as I finished grading the last exams and mailing all my books to California (or Colorado), we sold our bed and bookcases, packed up the car, and left whatever remained by the garbage bin. Maomao was a little more relaxed on this road trip, sometimes even eating while we were driving (last time, he went on a hunger fast for the first few days). Here are the three of us, driving somewhere in Arkansas:



We left well after noon on May 10 (Thursday) and made it the first day only as far as Memphis, where we had dinner at a perfectly decent Vietnamese restaurant (Knoxville, by contrast, has no decent Vietnamese restaurants). We spent the night at a Super 8 by the Mississippi River:



The location was lovely, though the motel will need some work before it is really ready for guests. The first room we were placed in had a large hole in the wall that went deep into the building. We knew Maomao would go exploring and we'd probably never see him again, so we asked the guy at the front office if we could have a room without a hole in the wall. He seemed to know exactly what we were talking about. The moving from room to room was made somewhat more complicated by the fact that we were experiencing a tremendous downpour at that very moment. Here's a picture the next morning of Gina sniffing a Magnolia petal in the park across the street:



From Memphis, we drove west across Arkansas and into Texas at Texarkana. The drive was uneventful. I called Janie in the early afternoon to see if she happened to be in Dallas (she was not), and then to ask her for recommendations regarding Chinese restaurants in the Dallas region. She directed us to a Chinese strip mall in Richardson, TX. We stocked up on snacks at the Chinese grocery and also had dinner (noodles) at Jeng Chi Restaurant. That night, we made it as far as Temple (south of Waco).

The next morning, we continued south on the 35, stopping at Austin to have a look around the university. Gina had her first Jamba Juice and we then ate prepared foods from the Chinese grocery store next to our car in front of an apartment building near the corner of Lavaca and MLK. We made it into a bus tour of Austin. The tour guide announced on the loud speaker the history of the apartment building and then observed, "and in front, there are two people having a snack."

We arrived at Barry & Kathii's place around 1:30 pm.